All I'd like to do is provide shining examples of good communication and PR. There may be no company that does a satisfactory job in the eyes of the hungry gamer, but if we set our own expectations as a community based on evidence, everyone wins.
I guess I'm one of those imagine Blizzard being sincere as EA is being with the BF3 beta, would make things a lot less stressful for us - but I guess they would need to lose some of their playerbase to value that nowadays
Gaming companies deserve respect for the daunting task of not only developing complex products, but managing a particularly bitchy customer base. The way we can best help gaming companies help us is to communicate our expectations clearly, with more evidence and less emotion.
110% true, +1. If most of the playerbase gave as much thought to that as you do, I'm sure we'd have a much cleaner environment to interact and the official forums wouldn't be full of trolls/wouldn't suck
Are you positive you wanna bring up Valve to a PR debate? Like, really? It's one of the companies with the most amount of delays and problems in PRs to date.
The whole Half Life 2 issue - "we're gonna split it into 3 episodes, and release one each year", fail number 1. The whole Left 4 Dead issue - "we're gonna update it as much as possible", bzzz, fail number 2, L4D2 was released less than a year after the first and L4D had almost 0 updates/patches.
DotA 2 had a ton of months without a single piece of news (except "changelog" leaks from the people invited to the International), and the only reason it had some news now is because Icefrog knows how damaging it can be to not talk to fans (since he was a gamer himself) and because everyone was expecting the beta to begin a month ago, and yet it's going to take another 6 months for them to even release the unfinished version used in the tournament.
BF 3 only wants that much beta attention because of the whole MW3 vs BF3 battle. They want to recover as many people lost in the past games to other shooter franchises (GoW, Halo) due to crappy PR. And they're only doing that because they know what most mainstream gamers think -> "beta = early access to the game, so I can tell my friends. lulz!".
I'm not saying Blizzard is doing everything perfectly. They delay games too (all of them?). They almost fail at delivering patches (hi, 1.13) and the way they're handling this specific beta is bad imho, giving away a lot of keys to press sites like gamespot and kind of ignoring fansites who kept the hype alive for all these years.
But I wouldn't at all put those other companies in a pedestal and pretend they're much better. Those a far from good examples of great PR to me.
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110% true, +1. If most of the playerbase gave as much thought to that as you do, I'm sure we'd have a much cleaner environment to interact
and the official forums wouldn't be full of trolls/wouldn't suckThe whole Half Life 2 issue - "we're gonna split it into 3 episodes, and release one each year", fail number 1. The whole Left 4 Dead issue - "we're gonna update it as much as possible", bzzz, fail number 2, L4D2 was released less than a year after the first and L4D had almost 0 updates/patches.
DotA 2 had a ton of months without a single piece of news (except "changelog" leaks from the people invited to the International), and the only reason it had some news now is because Icefrog knows how damaging it can be to not talk to fans (since he was a gamer himself) and because everyone was expecting the beta to begin a month ago, and yet it's going to take another 6 months for them to even release the unfinished version used in the tournament.
BF 3 only wants that much beta attention because of the whole MW3 vs BF3 battle. They want to recover as many people lost in the past games to other shooter franchises (GoW, Halo) due to crappy PR. And they're only doing that because they know what most mainstream gamers think -> "beta = early access to the game, so I can tell my friends. lulz!".
I'm not saying Blizzard is doing everything perfectly. They delay games too (all of them?). They almost fail at delivering patches (hi, 1.13) and the way they're handling this specific beta is bad imho, giving away a lot of keys to press sites like gamespot and kind of ignoring fansites who kept the hype alive for all these years.
But I wouldn't at all put those other companies in a pedestal and pretend they're much better. Those a far from good examples of great PR to me.